The global Internet has become a mass media on par with radio and television. And just like radio and television content, the content on the Internet is largely supported by advertising dollars. The main advertising supported portion of the Internet is the “World Wide Web” that displays Hypertext Mark-Up language (HTML) documents distributed using the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP).
Two of the most common types of advertisements on the World Wide Web portion of the Internet are banner advertisements and text link advertisements. Banner advertisements are generally images or animations that are displayed within an Internet web page. Text link advertisements are generally short segments of text that are linked to the advertiser's web site.
With any advertising-supported business model, there needs to be some metrics for assigning monetary value to the internet advertising. Radio stations and television stations use ratings services that assess how many people are listening to a particular radio program or watching a particular television program in order to assign a monetary value to advertising on that particular program. Radio and television programs with more listeners or watchers are assigned larger monetary values for advertising. With Internet banner type advertisements, a similar metric may be used. For example, the metric may be the number of times that a particular Internet banner advertisement is displayed to people browsing various web sites. Each display of an internet advertisement to a web viewer is known as an “impression.”
In contrast to traditional mass media, the internet allows for interactivity between the media publisher and the media consumer. Thus, when an internet advertisement is displayed to a web viewer, the internet advertisement may include a link that points to another web site where the web viewer may obtain additional information about the advertised product or service. Thus, a web viewer may ‘click’ on an internet advertisement and be directed to that web site containing the additional information on the advertised product or service. When a web viewer selects an advertisement, this is known as a ‘click through’ since the web viewer ‘clicks through’ the advertisement to see the advertiser's web site.
A click-through clearly has value to the advertiser since an interested web viewer has indicated a desire to see the advertiser's web site. Thus, an entity wishing to advertise on the internet may wish to pay for such click-through events instead of paying for displayed internet advertisements. Internet advertising services have therefore started offering internet advertising on a pay-per-click basis wherein advertisers pay for a certain number of web viewers that click on advertisements.
To maximize the advertising fees that may be charged, internet advertising services must therefore display advertisements that are most likely to capture the interest of the web viewer. Thus, the overall goal is to maximize the probability of having a web viewer click on the advertisement. In order to achieve this goal, it would be desirable to be able to estimate the probability of a web viewer clicking on various different advertisements that may be displayed to the user.